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Dr Jon Hughes - Reader in German and Cultural Studies

Dr Jon Hughes - Reader in German and Cultural Studies

I teach at all levels on the German, Comparative Literature and Culture, and International Film/Film Studies programmes at Royal Holloway.

I am a specialist in modern German and Austrian culture with a particular interest in the Weimar Republic, the anti-Fascist exile and Nazi Germany. I also research the history of sport and cultural responses to sport and leisure in the German-speaking countries.

My first-year teaching includes a number of CLC courses including ML1101 International Film: Contexts and Practices and ML1102 The Birth of Film. My second-year course GM2124 Childhood and Youth in Modern German Culture covers drama, novels and films from the 19th to the 21st centuries. In the final year I teach GM3134 National Socialism and The Third Reich in German Film and Visual Culture from 1933 to the Present. Almost all of my teaching is comparative and interdisciplinary in nature.

I have a particular interest in the work of the Austrian novelist and journalist Joseph Roth (1894-1939), the subject of my 2006 monograph Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth's Writing in the 1920s, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 67 (Leeds: Maney, 2006) .

In 2017 I published an interdisciplinary monograph on the cultural, social and political significance of the legendary German boxer Max Schmeling (1905-2005): Max Schmeling and the Making of a National Hero in Twentieth-Century Germany (Palgrave Studies in Sport and Politics, 2017). In my current research I am investigating the representation of leisure in German literature and film.

My full research profile can be found here.

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